How do I force Google App Deploy to upload a tgz file of my Meteor app instead of 57K individual files?

Have a Meteor application that I’m deploying to a custom flex environment. Deploying same built folder to multiple Google Projects. Usually a .tgz file is created in my local temp folder and then uploaded to the projects default Google bucket and extracted from there to create an App Engine version.

Usually isn’t working for me in one of the projects and instead the gcloud app deploy command is uploading 57K individual files from node_modules . This makes a process go from minutes to multiple hours (ran it over night and still not done).‘

I’ve tried reinitializing the gcloud configuration, updating gcloud components, changing the default bucket, but not working. It’s doing some sort of check to see what’s been uploaded because it’ll skip uploaded files if I kill and start again.